Report on Two events at ICE-TCS, Reykjavik University

(SCS). As usual at this time of the year, teaching-related matters took centre stage and occupied most faculty members , especially since we had just welcomed our third intake of well over 300 new computer science students. However, many of us at the Icelandic Centre of Excellence in Theoretical Computer Science (ICE-TCS) will remember the first week of the new academic year for two events showcasing the artistic and scien-including a good number of our undergraduate students, and featured a keynote address by Erik entitled Folding Paper: Visual Art Meets Mathematics. Art and science are often viewed as very different, and somewhat antithetic, human endeavours, so much so that some artists happily profess ignorance of the basic methods and results of science and some scientists sneer at art. In 1959, this prompted British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow to express his view that " the intellectual life of the whole of western society " was split into two separate cultures—namely the sciences and the humanities—and that this was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems. However, we can all mention key figures from the Renaissance and earlier times who were both artists and scientists. Is the breed of the Renaissance man a thing from a long gone past? The aim of Crossroads of Art and Science was to provide resounding evidence that the distinction between art and science in modern society is fictitious. We did so by showcasing three figures of polymaths whose work, be it artistic or scientific, benefits from the interplay of art and science. Erik Demaine needs no introduction to the readers of this piece. He helped start the field of Computational Origami, but he is also an artist, some of whose work has been exhibited at the MoMA, amongst other venues. He uses art to explore the feasibility of some of his mathematical ideas and mathematics to suggest artistic ideas, leading, for instance, to paper or glass sculptures. To quote Erik himself: